20B20W - 15th book, Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco

There are several reasons I picked up Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde (The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95)

 - A good friend had recommended Sacco

 - One of my favourite sportsmen ever was the Croat - Goran Ivanisevic

 - No Man's Land which is about the senselessness of the Yugoslovian conflict is among my top 5 movies ever

 - Christopher Hitchens has written the foreword

 - I am not much of a graphic novel buff and the genre itself is completely new to me (As an aside, Sacco strikes you as a quasi-journalist due to his knack for sounding like a archivist/reporter)

 

My first reaction was "WTF is Hitch doing in the foreword of a graphic novel?" And I read the foreword in the library before I picked the Gorazde up. It was like most stuff Hitch writes, compelling.

Now the novel itself is compelling. Sacco's art is by turns beautiful, purely as art itself and the tale he tells - sad & depressing, uplifting and absurd. Why would people in a war-torn region think of jeans as the first thing they would need?

The book leaves you with the kind of dryness and emptiness that you get when you have cried your heart out and can't any longer. It should be made essential reading for everyone incl. all the idiots who think war is the answer.

Here are some haunting lines from the book "Dubrovnik and Sarajevo endured their maulings in the living rooms of all those with a TV set. But Gorazde had been cut off from cameras. Its suffering was the sole property of those who had experienced it..."

It is a scary thought to know that people with whom you once celebrated birthdays with, could shoot you the next day in a conflict.

Makes one wonder why conflict is treated with such a detached feeling in schools when we study history. For most Indians and Pakistanis for example, Partition is perhaps just an event in history. For those who moved to either side of the border of course, it is an altogether different feeling/memory. Perhaps a new generation of Indians and Pakistanis could study this as part of history in the future and see the futility of war/conflict. I remember we used to have this subject called Moral Science in school. That could do well with some real stories.